les from London, on the road to Epsom. He was engaged in
public affairs, being at one time secretary to the Earl of Suffolk, and
also a member of Parliament. But I enroll him in my wet-day service
simply as the author of the most appreciative and most tasteful treatise
upon landscape-gardening which has ever been written,--not excepting
either Price or Repton. It is entitled, "Observations on Modern
Gardening," and was first published in 1770. It was the same year
translated into French by Latapie, and was to the Continental gardeners
the first revelation of the graces which belonged to English cultivated
landscape. In the course of the book he gives vivid descriptions of
Blenheim, Hagley, Leasowes, Claremont, and several other well-known
British places. He treats separately of Parks, Water, Farms, Gardens,
Ridings, etc., illustrating each with delicate and tender transcripts of
natural scenes. Now he takes us to the cliffs of Matlock, and again to
the farm-flats of Woburn. His criticisms upon the places reviewed are
piquant, full of rare apprehension of the most delicate natural
beauties, and based on principles which every man of taste must accept
at sight. As you read him, he does not seem so much a theorizer or
expounder as he does the simple interpreter of graces which had escaped
your notice. His suggestions come upon you with such a momentum of
truthfulness, that you cannot stay to challenge them.

There is no argumentation, and no occasion for it. On such a bluff he
tells us wood should be planted, and we wonder that a hundred people had
not said the same thing before; on such a river-meadow the grassy level
should lie open to the sun, and we wonder who could ever have doubted
it. Nor is it in matters of taste alone, I think, that the best things
we hear seem always to have a smack of oldness in them,--as if we
_remembered_ their virtue. "Capital!" we say; "but hasn't it been said
before?" or, "Precisely! I wonder I didn't do or say the same thing
myself." Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any performance, you may
be sure that it has been directed by a sound instinct. It is not a sort
of criticism any one is apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash
gardening.

Whately alludes to the analogy between landscape-painting and
landscape-gardening: the true artists in either pursuit aim at the
production of rich pictorial effects, but their means are different.
Does the painter seek to give steepness to a